Analysis: Budget deal spawns winners, losers

By Chuck Raasch, Gannett National Writer

WASHINGTON  Watching the 2011 budget agreement come together six months after its deadline was like trying to read tea leaves in a hurricane. There were no long-term winners in a process that proved how difficult the road to a balanced budget will be.

Winner: The troops and military families. The possibility of soldiers fighting and dying while not being paid was one of the most significant factors that spurred the 11th-hour agreement Friday night. And by focusing at least for a few hours on them, Congress and the American people were reminded that we are at war, and that real Americans are fighting and dying.

Loser: Washington. Nowhere else could a process that ended more than half a year after it was supposed to, and resulted in minuscule cuts as compared to an anticipated $1.5 trillion deficit, end up with the participants congratulating themselves for beating an arbitrary deadline by 65 minutes after spending the day beating up on one another in public. This sausage-making was ugly, and it reminded Americans that their government is still badly divided, and often only able to work in crisis mode. And a fiscal crisis is coming, if not here already. The way this was handled does not inspire much confidence for looming donnybrooks over the 2012 budget and deficit ceiling.

Winner:John Boehner and his Republican House caucus. The new speaker of the House was able to stretch Democrats to roughly $39 billion in current-year cuts —" far beyond what they originally wanted. It barely tickles the deficit, but it was an important victory because Republicans who run the House have made the debate about how much to cut. Boehner also lowered the budget baseline for next year's fight, an important and little understood part of this battle because of its multiplying factor over the years. Boehner was able to do something that many of his detractors had doubted he could do: hold together a coalition that includes ambitious individual members with conflicting goals and scores of new tea party Republicans who wanted much bigger cuts.

Loser:Harry Reid and Senate Democrats. They held together, yes, but they also gave far more in cuts than they originally intended. Their rhetoric seemed out of proportion to the Republicans' argument that these cuts were pennies on the dollar in cuts needed. Far more than President Barack Obama and the Republicans, they came across as defenders of a status quo that most Americans say is unsustainable.

Winner: Obama —" for now. He could have suffered big political wounds had the government shut down. By avoiding that, he misses deeper criticism that he has not led forcefully enough in this budget debate, and the economy was spared the damage he had feared from a shutdown. But this battle shifted the early 2012 presidential focus to the deficit, which remains at record levels under his presidency. Does he have Bill Clinton's political skills —" and will —" to work with warring Republicans and Democrats and deliver meaningful deficit reduction and budget reforms?

Loser:Nancy Pelosi. The Democratic leader has become a legislative irrelevancy, even as her Democrats try to devise a strategy to take back the House in 2012. On Friday, as negotiators were crunching the final numbers of a deal, she was at a forum at Tufts University in Boston about her legacy as the first woman speaker of the House. Republicans pointed out that that legacy included not passing a 2011 budget.

Winner and loser: Tea party. Democrats tried to demonize the movement, but it is far more disparate —" and conflicted —" than most people understand. It is united by one thing, however, and that is to cut government. On that measure, it came out a winner in this early budget skirmish, even if its more prominent activists are grumbling that more cuts were necessary. But its success has come with a price. Polls also show that more Americans are wary of it as a force in American politics than they were before last year's elections. And some tea partiers "my way or the highway" approach could be a problem for Boehner and the Republicans going forward.

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